a circle in the chain of life
by faithunbreakable
Summary: Luficer fell and Michael watched. Dean will not. Season four.


_Disclaim Her: I do not own them boys. Title taken from Deus Ibi Est._

_Summary: Lucifer fell and Michael watched. Dean will not. _

_Warnings: The author was feeling the decidedly empty while writing this. The story may reflect that utter apathy. Cheers, folks. _

oOo

**a circle in the chain of life**

oOo

He wakes in a box, gasping, trying to remember, to breathe, to keep the tattered remains of himself together. His grave is shallow but it is only instinct that gets him to the surface.

Sunlight.

It's been so long since he's seen the sunlight.

He closes his eyes, breathes in the scent of it, warm and clean, and tries not to look, not to see, the scorched earth and dead plants left in the wake of his glorious return to the world.

After a while, once he remembers his name and purpose, his childhood and future, once he has himself mostly scraped together, he strips, shakes the dirt out of his clothes and redresses. He ties his shirt around his waist and starts walking.

oOo

Gas station. Telephone. Bobby and disbelief. He hotwires the only car within miles and takes off.

Bobby, Bobby, Bobby. Alive. Whole. Gruff and soft, gentle and deadly. Bobby. The father he never had. He finds him, gathers him with words and demonstrations and puppy dog eyes he hasn't used in so long.

Next stop: Sammy.

oOo

Motel room. That little demon bitch opens the door, blathers on about pizza and late delivery and he pretends he doesn't recognize her, pretends he can't see what crawls under her dead skin.

If he kills her now, Sam will never trust him fully, will never listen, will follow, instead, the path she set him on because if she dies now, he'll never have the chance to find out that she's scum. He'll go on remembering the girl that saved him, instead of the demon that condemned them all.

Dean closes his eyes briefly, pushes away the impulse to grab her, to twist and tear and show her what he learned Below, while she was up here, fucking his baby brother. He doesn't exhale until she leaves five minutes later with a bland smile in his direction.

He sits down next to Sam, feels his brother's warmth, hears his beating heart, his voice. Smells him, sees him, tastes him like he tastes sunlight. He wants to curl up right here, next to Sammy, his Sammy, and cry like a baby, cry forever, beg, beg for them to stay here, like this, forever, to never go out, to never look for what brought him back from hell.

For Sammy to never ask questions and find too many answers, for the world to just keep on turning, to forget about them, just two lost boys, nobody important, nobody that matters in any way at all.

But he can't. He's here for a reason, has a job to do, a brother to save.

Not the world. Just his brother.

The rest doesn't matter.

oOo

Sam lies and Dean lies and they summon Castiel because that's what the script says. He waits with Bobby, bantering, quipping. Because that's what he does.

Castiel is late, comes with a light show and slamming doors, a demonstration of heavenly power. Their gazes meet for less than a second but it is enough.

_Dean? _Castiel whispers in his mind and he hears, understands, where once he would have been a whimpering mess on the floor. Hell and Heaven, war and death, they've flipped a few switches inside of him somewhere, turned up a few dials and taken out a few filters.

Nevermind that now.

He meets the angel's gaze and whispers back, _Yes_.

Cas nods, knowing all he needs to.

oOo

What follows are days and weeks of painful conversations, about angels and God, Heaven and Hell and the ultimate, unanswerable question of _why._

Why him? Why them? Why doesn't God swoop down from Above and save them all?

He flings those questions into the space between him and Sam, knowing that his disbelief will only serve to strengthen Sam's faith and they need that so much.

Secretly, he's glad that God has left the building. Because if He was still up there, Dean would have had a battalion of angels on his ass a long time ago. After all, his existence isn't exactly sanctioned.

It might have been once, but a lot of things have changed since then and Cas… Cas is just as _unsanctioned _as him these days.

_I dislike that word, _the angel tells him.

He rolls his eyes, slants a quick look in Sammy's direction and returns, _I didn't ask you to come._

Cas is silent because Dean always says that and the angel still always follows him. In his own strange love- and sexless way, Cas loves Dean, as much as he knows how.

Love, Dean muses, gripping the steering wheel tighter, is not a sin. But it should be. It makes people do some spectacularly fucking dumb things.

oOo

Sam is using his ESP. Check on that. They have a fight, loud and violent. Lamps die. A mirror, too. Dean aches inside and out as he delivers the angels' warning to Sam, knowing it won't sink in, not really.

As long as Sam believes he's doing good, they are all doomed.

Good intentions, road to Hell, all that.

As if they aren't headed that way anyway.

oOo

And then Halloween gets totally away from him and it doesn't matter anyway. He really wants to punch Uriel in the face though, wants to break that fucker to pieces for what he's going to do.

Cas just stands there, next to the traitor, pretending he doesn't know, doesn't remember. The angel always lets things go as they should, silent and stoic in the face of Dean's endless trial runs and catastrophes. His endless fuck-ups.

Sam asks about Hell – thanks to fucking Uriel, again – and Dean brushes him off, for now.

If he doesn't tell Sam, his brother won't trust him, won't believe him. What little faith he has in his messed up big brother will turn to silent pity.

If he tells Sam all that he did and was down there, all the , Sam won't trust him either, believing Ruby's whispers of 'he's different' and 'he's wrong'.

He has to walk a careful line, tell Sam enough but not too much, keep the balance between gaining and losing trust. So he talks of Hell in metaphors and gestures, knowing that it's the only way it works.

Equal amounts of truth and lie. Any other combination backfires on him and ends the world that much faster. He learned that the hard way.

oOo

There's the blood of course. Demon blood.

Sam thinks Dean doesn't know, Castiel looks away, Ruby pushes and pushes until they are all close to screaming and Dean is torn, as always at this point, so torn.

Stop it or let it go. Do it, Sam runs off. Or he listens and the apocalypse stretches on forever, going, going, going, never ending because Lilith never dies and the gate never opens.

The gate needs to open. Lucifer needs to have a body so Dean can wrap his hands around the fucker's throat and _squeeze. _

You can't kill an idea. But you can fucking well kill the goddamn fucking Devil planning to ride his brother into the end of the world.

He still believes so. That's what he tells himself. Cas whispers in the dead of night, _It cannot be that way, Dean. _

And Dean knows that. He cannot let Lucifer gain a vessel. The Devil cannot walk free. He can never wrap his hands around anyone's neck and squeeze until his fingers cramp and his arms shake, until all the helpless rage is gone.

He's fighting shadows and myths and he lets Sam drink the blood because he can't stop him anymore now than he can when Lucifer is wearing him to the goddamn prom.

oOo

Cas comes when Sam leaves, late at night, when Dean lies in bed, pretending to sleep.

Cas comes, sets his vessel down on the other bed and lets his essence wrap around Dean, warm and heavy.

_Dean, _he says. No more.

_Cas, _Dean returns._ How long?_

He gets a bit confused, these days, all the timelines and plans and possibilities mixing in his head.

_Four months, _the angel replies.

Four months until the end of the world.

_Seals?_

_Twenty-one are left._

Cas used to lie about the seals, tell them there were more than that, to give them hope. Dean wants to ask, some days, if he ever really believed they could stop it, or if he knew, even that first time, how it had to end.

He never does.

Twenty-one seals. It's time to find Anna.

oOo

Anna, who looks at him and right through him onto the twisted dirt road that is his past and future, tangled around him like a ball of blood red yarn.

Anna, who explodes in a flash of light and brilliance.

She always does.

oOo

And Alastair.

After all this time, the terror hasn't lessened, but his skin has grown thicker and when the demon flashes through the pediatrician's eyes, Dean flashes his own _whatever _right back.

Flipped switches and missing filters. He was crippled by all he learned Below once. These days, he fights with Hell in one hand and Heaven in the other, all his tricks lined up neatly in the shelves of his mind. Angelbloodmagic, hellrazorbladescreams.

They ask him to torture the torturer and he looks at Castiel, looks him in the eye and walks into that room, silently.

Alastair has a neck to squeeze and breath to strangle from his human vessel.

oOo

This time, the demon doesn't get free and his truths only get a tired look from his well missed prodigy. Castiel made sure to place the trap in a way that Uriel can't break it and Alastair's tongue has been dulled on endless repetitions of this scene.

The first time he was weak. The first time he landed on that floor, bloody and broken, Hell trapping his mind inside its bowels.

The first time he needed Sam to save him and that was all the confirmation little brother needed to keep on going down that road.

Now Sam comes bursting into the room to find a broken man on the floor alright, but it's his brother sitting on his chest, knife in hand.

Dean makes sure his eyes are clear, looks up at Sammy and says to wait outside.

He asks, afterwards, what and how and why and Dean turns to look at the man that became of the baby he carried out of a burning house, at the man that will be the house that burns the world to the ground and all he says is, Hell.

Sam doesn't call him weak anymore and Castiel's eyes fill with sorrow and starlight.

Alastair dies laughing, thinking Dean to be what he made him.

oOo

When Cas isn't there to stand at the foot end of his bed and watch him toss and turn, Tessa sometimes is. She stands there, hands in her pockets, expression as blank as the angel's, just watching.

He doesn't know if she knows he can see her and he never acknowledges death standing three feet away, watching with distant eyes, waiting. He was hers. Once. Again. Already. Never.

She had him, held him, took him away on swift wings.

And always, always, she loses her hold on him before they reach the gates of After and he slips, falls, crashes back into his body and his grave.

The angels have nothing good in store for him, she told him. Something dark is coming.

It's already here and it's not the angels he's playing for.

oOo

Ruby comes closer and Sam grows more distant, space and road between them, miles and inches, a whole universe.

One afternoon, when Sam comes back with a glassy look in his eyes and sweat on his face, Dean sits on the hood of his car, in the sun, eyes closed. His brother sits next to him.

Sammy, he asks eventually, what would you give to stop the seals from breaking?

And Sammy looks at him, gaze sharpening, breath evening out, looks and says, Anything.

Anything?

Yes. Anything. Why wouldn't he.

Anything? Including…

Dean trails off. He does that, leaving sentences unsaid, things half spoken. He's not used to having secrets. Even now. Sometimes, he just wants to spill it all, throw it at his brother's feet, truth, truth, truth. Fix it, Sammy, please fix it.

But he doesn't because he knows his brother and he knows that Sam will try.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Including you? Sam asks, too perceptive.

Dean doesn't answer and little brother carefully corrects his statement. Anything but you, he says.

Dean nods and smiles a bit, wan and bitter. Sam will never kill him. He will never kill Sam.

And thus the world must end.

oOo

He finds it ironic, in the moments he lets himself think about it, that Michael and Lucifer were brothers, too. Are. They still are. Little brother who rebelled, big brother who fought, who tried to make him see the light. Little brother who fell. Big brother who remained behind, half a man – angel, whatever – forever regretting.

An absent father, a greedy hatelove that eats them alive and war on Earth. Heaven and Hell converging on two brothers and two brothers. Two times two.

Four. Two bodies. Four souls.

Or maybe not.

Sometimes, after the irony, comes the taste of familiarity that floods his mouth, the whisper of _done that before. _Before before, that is. Maybe his brother already is the devil.

Maybe he said yes and this is Michael's head, his version of rest, his idea of his vessel's heaven. A place where Dean gets to forever try to save his brother.

If that's true, then he could stop. He could just stop, right here, stop the car and sit here and not do anything about his brother in the passenger seat, the angel in the backseat, the future memory in his head.

He could sit here and the world would never end.

_Dean, _Cas scolds. It lacks conviction.

oOo

Some small part of him is shamed, shamed to the bone, for letting Adam die without even trying to save the kid. His brother.

The rest of him averts his eyes from the body and presses his lips into a thin line. The kid was a Winchester and their blood is cursed with angels. He wonders who Adam would have housed. Gabriel? Azrael? Some low ranking cherub pigeon?

He can imagine Gabriel wearing that body, the abandoned youngest, who watched his entire family walk away, left alone in Heaven. Poor baby.

oOo

Sam keeps insisting that he can do this. He is strong. He is good. He does it for all the right reasons. He does and can't Dean see, can't he see that Sam needs to kill Lilith for touching Dean?

He has to, needs to, wants to because the thirst for blood and revenge is eating him alive. He wants to make a world without Lilith so Dean can feel safe and stop having nightmares.

The problem is that it's not Lilith that causes Dean to wake panting and shaking. It's what comes after her.

oOo

There is a job, a small, simple one, shortly before the end of the world. It shouldn't take longer than two days. Dean shrugs and nods and lets Sam plan because every moment with his brother is precious, so precious.

Until Sam says Detroit and Dean brakes hard enough to give them both whiplash and turns the car around, refusing to say a single word until they are a safe distance of three states away from the city.

What's in Detroit, Sam wants to know.

Dean refuses to look, refuses to answer and knows that it's time.

oOo

They end up in the convent again.

They always do.

Things are different than before, details altered with every new return. Cas didn't help to trap Dean. Jimmy never walked free. Zachariah is still traipsing around in the dark, smelling daisies, waiting for his perfect war to come to him.

Sam still ran, but Dean stuck to his trail like glue. There was no fist fight. No ugly words. Those would have been the same as before, love and desperation wrapped in anger and helpless violence.

Sixty-five seals broken.

And they are back in the fucking convent.

oOo

Don't, Dean says, hands reaching out. Ruby stands at Sam's shoulder, dark and impatient, waiting for the final twist of the knife. Lilith hangs, suspended in mid-air by nary a thought and Dean wonders if Sam realizes it's not him that's keeping her there.

Dean…, he starts but doesn't finish.

You don't listen, Dean tells him, feeling as old as the stones under his feet. You don't listen and you kill Lilith for what happened to me. For justice you say, but it's revenge. It's always revenge. The last seal breaks. Lucifer walks free and Ruby cheers.

Cas burns. We all burn. And then we fight. War first, then Famine. Death. Pestilence. The order varies. Firestorms. Floods. Mothers slaughtering their children. The plague. Croatoan, Sam. People die in droves, angels disappear, demons rule. The world ends, Sammy.

He takes a deep breath and says, If you don't stop right now, the world ends.

It always does. Because this is Sam and Dean can never stop him.

It won't, Sam says and his words echo across a dozen years and versions of this day, this minute. Always the same. I can control it Dean. I can kill Lilith and make everything right.

His baby brother smiles at him, smiles with dimples he had the day he was born and turns to send Lilith to whatever comes beyond Hell. For good.

And Dean screams for him to stop, surges forward, shattering against Ruby and shattering her in return. But it's too late, too late, all that can save them now is a killing blow, just raise the gun, aim, aim it at your brother's head and pull the trigger, pull!

Anything but you, Dean thinks and the world explodes in white light.

oOo

_Dean, _Castiel sighs, weary more than angry. Dean cannot kill Sam. They have had this discussion.

And so Sam lives and Lucifer walks and the world burns. The road to hell is paved with one brother's love for another.

Everything they do, they do for each other.

And that's all she wrote.

Castiel, fallen rebel angel human soldier friend, Castiel sighs and weeps a single tear of brilliant, crystal perfection. Then he snaps his fingers and the world tilts sideways.

oOo

Again.

oOo

He wakes in a box.

oOo

The End


End file.
